


Life on the TARDIS

by fivefootnothing



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-25
Updated: 2009-09-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 21:44:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivefootnothing/pseuds/fivefootnothing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has to wake up someday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life on the TARDIS

She has to wake up someday.

Or so Peri keeps telling herself.

Because every moment she's spent aboard the TARDIS is like some sort of crazy daydream. The corridors that switch their paths depending on the day; the rooms that were libraries one hour and swamps the next; and then there's the Doctor himself. So normal, most of the time. Okay, so her definition of normal includes question marks on your collar and a stick of celery pinned to your coat like a boutonniere. An obsession with cricket so fierce that you have to dress the part every single day.

Maybe not so normal.

But even with the weirdness surrounding the Doctor, he still tries to promote a sense of normality in their lives, a sense of routine. Laundry day, for one thing. He always insists on doing the chore himself. She's never found the laundry room, but every week she aims to. And every week she hopes to catch the Doctor in some embarrassingly loud cardigan, even more embarrassing than the red-trimmed pullover. Or a t-shirt worn thin with age, emblazoned with the name of some obscure rock band from a planet she's never heard of. Something that proves he only owns the one set of clothes which requires laundering week after week. Every week she misses out. Every week she eventually gives up. Every week she ends up getting distracted.

And then, wherever she is, he's suddenly there too. All prim and proper, and hefting a laundry basket with her clothes, washed and pressed and pristine.

It was like...it was like she was living with an older brother fresh out of college and bumming around Europe for a few years before finally settling down into what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. Only, this _was_ what he aimed to do the rest of his life. Because he's not her older brother. He's an alien. That's hard to accept. He's. An. Alien. No matter how many times she thinks it or says it out loud or writes it down. That sweet young guy's actually a real live alien from another planet.

And his home (her home too, temporarily) is a time machine. It sounds like a really bad science fiction show. The kind with special effects on a shoestring budget. Cardboard and foam and greenscreen and guys in rubber suits pretending to be monsters. This is her reality now, the travelling. The dream. The...magic. She knew the Doctor would wave off any comparisons of science to magic. Very irritably too, all bristling annoyance, which made him all the more endearing. But that's really what it felt like to Peri. A fantasy. Alice following the White Rabbit through that hole. Wendy, John, and Michael coating themselves in fairy dust. Passing through a wardrobe or getting your house caught up in a tornado. Step into a blue box to change your life forever.

She lingers at the entrance a moment, at the barrier between worlds. Outside, the mundane, the humdrum, the unremarkable. Inside, the Doctor. He's occupied (or maybe obsessed) with those buttons and switches on the console, darting around the panels. One man doing the work of six. He glances up a moment and offers her a grin. It's the grin of a kid, really: happy and eager and just the slightest bit mischievous. And then it's gone. Each time he does smile, she sees it like a gift. Ephemeral. Fleeting. It's always like that with the Doctor, those brief snatches of experience. Terror one minute, wonder the next. Maybe someday they'll land somewhere long enough to _breathe_ before the running starts.

Fat chance.

But maybe...maybe she likes it this way. She likes the weirdness just beneath the normal. She likes the police box that's bigger on the inside. She likes that you don't notice the strange until you have to focus on it. Someday she'll ask about it all, about the cricket and about the celery. Someday she'll get around to asking his age.

Someday.

She can plan for someday. Because when you're with a Time Lord, you've got all the time in the world.


End file.
